


Shylock

by vaingloriousactor



Category: 19th Century CE RPF, American Civil War RPF
Genre: Anyway uh, I literally study these people and write about them fight me, Jewishness, Like legitimately study and write about them i mean, Other, anti semitic guilt, anti semitism, seriously this was all a thing and i'm doing this for fun
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-30
Updated: 2017-09-30
Packaged: 2019-01-07 02:13:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12223662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vaingloriousactor/pseuds/vaingloriousactor
Summary: Edwin Booth reflects on his performances as Shylock





	Shylock

**Author's Note:**

> So most of this is true.

Edwin plays Shylock many times in his life.  It was one of his more cherished roles, one that earned accolades, not as praised as Hamlet or Iago, but one that would drain the air from the room.  He had always remembered seeing his father drift into the synagogues scattered throughout California, speaking with the rabbis about how to breathe not just life, but love and understanding, into the role. For many years he did not understand, but then he did.

 

When Edwin is a young man, he is called Sephardic.  He hears the whispers of “He’s a Jew, you know,” or “Booth’s boy looks more like a Hebrew than his brother or old man. Poor soul.”  And so he tries to channel that into Shylock, a role he was far too young to play but was cast in anyway.  He doesn’t understand.  It is not enough to simply look like a Jew to play Shylock, he learns.

 

“Hath not a Jew eyes ?” He asks the audience but they still hate Shylock.

 

When his brother assassinates the president, they are all called Jew, not just Edwin, not just John. Asia converts and Edwin asks a priest to speak at the funeral. Edwin replaces the Hebrew on his Jewish father’s grave with both a Classical verse and one of saints.  He isn’t thinking about his brother’s crimes, he’s only feeling them and even when he issues an apology, he thinks of the dead president but he also thinks of his brother’s mutilated body being showcased as spectacle and he asks the audience,

 

“If you prick us, do we not bleed?” But again, they do not understand.  He is beginning to understand Shylock but no one will listen.  And so he translates the Jew of Venice’s lines into yiddish and when there are no yiddish words, German. And now when the characters respond so callously to Shylock, they don’t understand and they have no mercy.  Even Jessica does not speak to him in Yiddish.

 

“If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that,” he pleads but no one in the play understands.  But this time the audience does.  Shylock is misunderstood, he is hurt.

 

McVicker takes the first Mary’s possessions, ones that were meant to be saved for Edwina, and she hides them, torments him with threatened punishment.  This time when Edwin plays Shylock, he thinks of Leah and he thinks of the first Mary.  Some even said it was the performance that killed McVicker, the way he spat each line, this time in English once more.  Shylock who was angry, who was wronged, not Shylock trying desperately trying to vocalize his grief. He didn’t have to worry about being listened to anymore now that he held everyone’s attention.

 

Ignatius is a Jew of the practicing sort.  And Edwina holds his hand when she states they’re getting married.  Edwin is Shylock but he’s no longer perceived as Jew and Ignatius is certainly no Shylock.  The audience has seemed to have forgotten that Shylock is a Jew but if he were to publically support the marriage, they would remember.  When he bemoans the decision between daughter and gold, he bemoans what, to him, gold represents.  Gold is the motivator for his brother’s crime, a tarnished gold forever marring history.  But gold is the color of the trim of the marquee to his theater.  Gold is his new reputation, the one he made for his daughter and for himself. Edwina is in love and Ignatius is no Lorenzo. But if he chooses daughter, they all lose everything. He can support neither them nor the child he is certain his growing in his daughter’s womb. And so Shylock picks gold.

 

At the end of his career, Edwin plays Shylock a final time and he weeps during the final scene.  As he approaches death with greater rapidity every day he realizes that he, an old man like Shylock, lost the same God as that very Jew.  He thinks Shylock’s conversion is tragic.  Edwina invites him for Passover and he hopes that God, the same God he prayed smited his brother’s soul, is as forgiving as the Christian God claims to be.

 

Although the first Mary’s grave marker is in the shape of a cross, Edwina engraves her father’s stone with a quiet tribute to the God he and Shylock both turned from out of fear.

 

When she is an older, Edwina converts too and she thinks about Shylock.


End file.
